Fanfare for National Public Radio

4/18/2017

Aaron Copland died on Dec. 2, 1990.

We were driving north from Florida to New York on one of those all-nighters we used to pull.

As we drove through coastal Georgia and South Carolina, we listened to works by the great American composer, plus critiques of his career.

Past Brunswick, past Savannah, past Charleston, the radio played ballet scores like "Billy the Kid" and "Rodeo" and "Appalachian Spring" as well as concert pieces like "El Salón Mexico" and "Fanfare for the Common Man" and "Lincoln Portrait."

When one station crackled out, just a slight adjustment produced another station, somewhere from 88 to 91 on the FM dial. All that evening, we scarcely missed a note of Copland’s musical references to cowboys and immigrants and martyred heroes.

We were connected to the culture of our entire country, not just Big Town but all the places where classical music touches the heart, the brain, the soul.

I count 17 NPR stations in Georgia and eight in South Carolina.

We know this country well enough to realize that it’s not all political bombast and preachers and country music and rock. As we drove north, in the regional cities and small towns and way out in the counties, people were driving or reading or even falling asleep to the work of the master from Boys High in Brooklyn, who never attended college but instead composed music.

This synchronized symphony along Interstate 95 was no accident. It came through a chain of National Public Radio stations, bringing classical music and news and features to all the people and subsidized in part by tax money, via public officials who have recognized, over the years, that pipers (and composers) must be paid.

Now National Public Radio is under siege, its subsidies threatened. The new regime seems to regard enlightened talk and classical music to be frivolous, even seditious.

In New York, we read that subsidies by wealthy and middle class patrons may keep our two radio stations going.

This means we can count on Brian Lehrer switching intellectual gears every weekday morning on WNYC-FM; we can expect Terrance McKnight to keep on playing his eclectic swath of classical music on WQXR-FM.

We’ll be all right. But in so many other places, the high end of talk and music is threatened.

There are worse things, more dangerous things, worth hectoring your local member of Congress. But In the midst of all the other causes, people need to stand up for National Public Radio, all over this land.

Not by Accident

Joshua Rubin

4/18/2017 04:42:27 pm

This saddens me deeply. I more or less lived at my college radio station for four years (not an NPR station), and I interned for a month at KANZ-FM near Garden City, Kansas. That station is now the High Plains Public Radio network, and covers large swaths of western Kansas, Nebraska, the Oklahoma panhandle, and bits of Texas and eastern Colorado. It provides a tremendous cultural and informational resource to those areas, and stations like these will be the hardest hit by cuts.

http://hppr.org/topic/hppr-history (how they started -- I interned when it was still one station in an abandoned elementary school in a hamlet of about 30 houses)

http://hppr.org/hppr-stations-coverage (map of where they cover)

http://hppr.org/schedule/week (what they air)

I would say the effort to cut this funding is shortsighted but that gives too much credit to the intention. the intent is to isolate people and limit the independent flow of news,information, and culture.

George Vecsey

4/18/2017 07:37:26 pm

Josh: absolutely. Culture is suspect; reporting is downright dangerous. i think of Obama's glee at being around scientists and artists. How far we have fallen. G

Brian Savin

4/19/2017 07:19:10 am

Copeland and NPR. Fascinating......

In the early 70's, when I was in law school, on a Saturday afternoon I believe, I was walking past DAR Constitution Hall on Lincoln's Birthday and a poster caught my eye that read: "Portrait of Lincoln, today" It was being performed by the Army Corp orchestra and in very small letters it said "conductor, Aaron Copeland." It also said, "FREE." I looked at my watch and saw the performance was in 20 minutes, I went in and sat down.

I had had some interesting conversations about Copeland with an old family friend, who was a composer, and to see this man in person was irresistible. I will never forget him, or the Lt. Colonel whose narration convinced me I was hearing the voice of God.

When I graduated, I went off to Wall Street but a good friend and member of our study group, Ernie, stayed in Washington and took a newly created job: General Counsel of National Public Radio. Ernie was a radio announcer in college and had a voice that would give that Lt. Colonel a run for his money.

Years later, my old composer friend, Fred, was set to record some just composed songs in NYC's Town Hall. The day the recording session was to take place, Ernie called me to say he was in town and ask whether we could get together. I told Ernie about my event and said Fred needed a narrator, would he do it? Sure, was my friend's reply. Copeland was in the conversation.

So there you have it, George, Copeland and NPR, and the world goes round.... Thanks so much for the memories! (Don't send me a bill for the therapy you just gave me!)

George Vecsey

4/19/2017 09:47:41 am

Brian, hey, you added to my education about TR. Thanks again.

complicated history of Constitution Hall, involving Marian Anderson.
She was rebuffed in 1939 (various versions of why) and many years later she sang there, I believe, six times. Never been. Imagine walking in and seeing Aaron Copland in person. GV

http://www.nytimes.com/1993/05/18/arts/fresh-perspectives-on-the-dar-s-rebuff-of-marian-anderson.html?pagewanted=all

Alan Rubin link

4/21/2017 11:36:28 am

I was fortunate to have lived and worked in the same zip code as Symphony Space, a true cultural gem. My business gave significant support during their very difficult start up years.

One evening was a birthday celebration for Aaron Copland and the focus was on how the music sound track enhanced a movie. An extremely remarkable evening.

Another time I was invited to an afternoon with the American Symphony orchestra for young children. They were exposed to the inner workings of an orchestra.

The highlight of the afternoon was when several children were given a baton an told to conduct the orchestra. The sound lowered if an arm went down. The speed also changed with arm movements.

The kids did not want to leave.

We have all witnessed people of all ages influenced by the arts.

Why is the arts and culture a seem to be a threat to so many people?

Brian Savin

4/21/2017 07:31:24 pm

Alan, I don't know Symphony Space, but I did know the Thalia very well, which was either close, or the same location. I lived on W 94th. and CPW was just Columbia Grammar School away. Where was your shop? I remember a kosher butcher at Broadway and 100th Street. My Father's mother always bought kosher poultry because she said that were the only thing even close to her European memories. When I moved back to NY I wanted to throw a party for my family. I prepared a turkey from that kosher butcher shop that my family declared was the best they ever had. (I won't pay YOU for the therapy you give me, either, but thanks so much for jogging wonderful memories!)

Ed Martin

4/22/2017 01:36:20 pm

What a pleasure to read an ode to Aaron Copeland and NPR. The Barbarians are not at the gate, they are in the White House, literally! From Venice, Florida to Magog, Quebec, our annual migration, we listen to NPR almost every inch of the way. If anyone is as old as dirt, in the mid 1950s NBC had a weekend program, Monitor, a fore-runner of "magazine" programming-NPR. First heard Bob and Ray on it while driving from NY to Tuscaloosa, (episodically, that is.) "Fanfare for..."

George Vecsey

4/23/2017 09:11:12 pm

Ed, I remember Monitor. I've taken some epic drives with 50,000 clear channel stations on AM at night -- Marshalltown, Iowa. WSM in Nashville. New Orleans at dawn after Mardi Gras, while driving across Tennessee to Kentucky. Easier to finagle the dial on old radios -- harder to do with digital (all or nothing). Funny dead spot for NPR east of Harrisburg PA to Central NJ. on route 78/ But a Quebec station comes in fine. Go figure. GV

Comments are closed.

QUOTES
More and More, I Talk to the Dead--Margaret Renkl

NASHVILLE — After my mother died so suddenly — laughing at a rerun of “JAG” at 10 p.m., dying of a hemorrhagic stroke by dawn — I dreamed about her night after night. In every dream she was willfully, outrageously alive, unaware of the grief her death had caused. In every dream relief poured through me like a flash flood. Oh, thank God!
Then I would wake into keening grief all over again.
Years earlier, when my father learned he had advanced esophageal cancer, his doctor told him he had perhaps six months to live. He lived far longer than that, though I never thought of it as “living” once I learned how little time he really had. For six months my father was dying, and then he kept dying for two years more. I was still working and raising a family, but running beneath the thin soil of my own life was a river of death. My father’s dying governed my days.
After he died, I wept and kept weeping, but I rarely dreamed about my father the way I would dream about my mother nearly a decade later. Even in the midst of calamitous grief, I understood the difference: My father’s long illness had given me time to work death into the daily patterns of my life. My mother’s sudden death had obliterated any illusion that daily patterns are trustworthy.
Years have passed now, and it’s the ordinariness of grief itself that governs my days. The very air around me thrums with absence. I grieve the beloved high-school teacher I lost the summer after graduation and the beloved college professor who was my friend for more than two decades. I grieve the father I lost nearly 20 years ago and the father-in-law I lost during the pandemic. I grieve the great-grandmother who died my junior year of college and the grandmother who lived until I was deep into my 40s.
Some of those I grieve are people I didn’t even know. How can John Prine be gone? I hear his haunting last song, “I Remember Everything,” and I still can’t quite believe that John Prine is gone.
-----
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/30/opinion/death-grief-memory.html
Jan. 30, 2023

Fanfare for National Public Radio

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